Day: July 31, 2013

On Friday, Congress will begin a five-week vacation. The bad news is after five weeks they will return to Washington. A hundred years ago, Congressional sessions began in December and ended in March; now they stretch over the entire year and accomplish much less. Oh, for the good old days.

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• “A Structural Feature Of Republican Politics”: GOP Obstruction As The New Normal In Washington (mykeystrokes.com)

This week has brought notice of the death of two political figures from the past:  Lindy Boggs and Harry Byrd, Jr.  Both in their late 90s and had been out of office and out of the news for a number of years.  But it is notable that although of similar age and from the south, they were opposites when it came to civil rights.

Lindy Boggs was the window of House Speaker Hale Boggs who died in a plane crash in Alaska.  I remember when this happened in 1972,  I was moving out of my student movement phase and beginning to take an interest in electoral politics. Boggs ran to replace him following a tradition of widows taking over for their politician husbands.   Boggs, however, was different.  She went on to serve nine terms in Congress (several of them representing a majority black district) and become a champion of women’s rights and…